Plus, I had my kitchen helper. Zoe wasn’t too helpful with chopping up the sweet potatoes (since you need a sharp knife to do that, and you need to not be 18 months old to use a sharp knife), but she actually did help with ripping the kale into small pieces.

I realize that talking about my toddler prepping kale makes me seem like a Crazy Health Nut Mom and I promise that I am not. Literally at the same time we were doing this, Elena was eating McDonald’s with her grandparents.

One of the garnishes for this salad were hazelnuts, which I love, but as I mentioned in my last post, Ben does not like in food. (Why? You can take this up with him if you care about why. We’re approaching 10 years together and his “no nuts with food” hangup is something that I have chosen not to argue about. Anymore.) Anyway, the nuts were supposed to be chopped, but since it was just me and the kale-ripper, I decided to take a shortcut and use this old-school nut chopper.

In our Torts class in law school, we read about a woman who mangled her hand with one of these, and ever since then I’ve been cautious about using it as it’s gone the way of the metal-tipped lawn jarts. This model is one I inherited from my grandmother (by which I mean I took it when we were cleaning out her house) and it did the job and I still have use of both my hands.

The recipe called for roasting the sweet potatoes in sumac (hence the name of the recipe), pickling the onions, boiling the farro, and then mixing everything together.

Garnishes included the hazelnuts along with cheese and mint.

There’s a fancy picture of the final product on the recipe card:

And here’s how mine turned out:

Not too different! It tasted good (I LOVE mint generally, and sweet potatoes and hazelnuts are generally good). We’ve had recipes with kale I think three weeks in a row, but as long as it’s cooked I don’t mind it. Eating raw kale is literally a workout.

Zoe was not interested in anything that was cooked, but she did eat the uncooked sweet potatoes and kale. I guess she’s one of those people that prefers crunchy things.